Overrepresentation of minorities in Special Ed....

[oneika...@hotmail.com]

There are many contributing factors to the overrepresentation of
minorities in Special Education. After reading this article I added
more to my personal list. One particularly is teachers not being
prepared to teach a child who is different from the norm. He may be
very active and even I myself find it very difficult to actually teach
children with high physical activity. So because this student tend to
show these behaviors, they education is often left with very big
gaps. Another factor is most minorities students are not school
ready. A lot of minorities from poverty stricken backgrounds are not
exposed to fluent conversation in the household. This factor make it
difficult for the students in their early childhood experience
understand a lot of language use and most time contributes to them
acting out and the consequences to them acting out is being
recommended for Special Ed. Another is teachers not having the
knowledge of good instructional stategies to help the students
overcome their language barriers, reading barriers, and etc. Which
also majorly contribute to the student being left behind. One of the
major contributing factors for me is bias testing. Samuda and Kong
(1989) assert, the very choice of objectives reflects the assumption
that the test takers "have been exposed to, and are familiar with, the
universe of information from which test items are drawn;
and ......that the language of the test is the langauge of the test
takers." (p. 28) If their poor, where do they learn about exotic
fruits and countries beyond what the school curriculum is and a
teacher can only expose a student to but so much.

One particular policy that appear to have affected this trend is
IDEA. This law states that having a disability that doesn't
necessarily qualify the student for Special Education services.

Recommendation #5 Implement curricular and instructional reforms.
Curriculum at the elementary level should be multicultural in nature
and should offer intensive instruction in reading, writing, and
mathematics, with an emphasis on meaninful and contextualized
presentation of material. This recommendation seem to fall in line
with dcps curriculum. I can remember in kindergarten learning to
write my name and color in the line and taking a nap. I am now
teaching kindergarten and I can see the intensive instruction in
reading, writing, and mathematics, it does make a difference in their
academic abilities as they move to upper grades. It requires the
students to intensively study phonics and use their decoding skills to
read easy and difficult text. It promotes writing on a daily and
requires 5 year olds to actually be able to add and subtract before
6. The job is challenging because I enjoy the teaching, but the
students get tired.